site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

According to the internet the Wonderlic test, which is an IQ test, is used by a large number of major American corporations, from Bank of America to American Airlines to Abbott medical. Dozens of other major corporations have their own in-house cognitive assessments. The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test. The US military and many parts of federal and state civil services use IQ tests. Somehow these places did not stop using them under legal pressure despite the disparate outcome standard being in place for fifty years or more.

The sole requirement for employers is that they must be able to prove that test performance equals job performance. This is absurdly simple to do in any profession in which performance can be objectively measured (which is most of them).

The major lost cases (iirc a big one semi-recently was some firefighter or cop promotions in New England) are where this standard couldn’t be shown to investigators. If you can prove it the justice department will typically just move on and not even look further into a case.

The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test

Obviously it correlates with IQ and G, but it’s not an IQ test.

The point of an IQ test is to measure something “intrinsic”, and so they try not to rely more than necessary on education (e.g. they tend not to include calculus questions), as this confounds your attempt to measure something intrinsic.

In contrast, a genius who has never programmed a computer or taken a CS class is going to fail a technical interview, which is literally by design.

This doesn't seem like a nit when the debate is around what tests are legal, illegal, or legally grey.

By ‘Google interview question’ I mean the historic kind that made Google a famous interviewer in the early 2000s where they’d ask how many pizza boxes could fit under the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever and see how you reasoned your way through the question.

But they and all the big tech companies have stamped out this sort of question precisely because of the chilling effect of the law. You can obviously make a case that it's related to job performance, but their legal departments prefer to stick to coding and behavioral questions where the case is self-explanatory.

Do we know this is the case? Up until now I had assumed these tests got abandoned because much of the predictive power of the test was based on people not knowing how to approach this novel situation and having to figure it out on the fly. Once the secret got out and people learned a script for this type of question, answering got easier and more routine and the tests ceased to be such a good indicator.

I recall the timeline of the tests going away being shortly after everyone on the internet started talking about Google interview questions and specifically questions of this type, and I don't think that was a coincidence.

But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.

It seems to me there are two axes here: vague versus concrete legislation, and restrictive versus unrestrictive. Complaining that the current system is too restrictive (or not restrictive enough) for private companies (or public organizations) seems like a fairly interesting debate. But I really really don't think you want to be asking for concrete legislation that irons out all the ambiguity, like "only these 5 industries can ask math questions during interviews", "you can only require applicants to write essays if their job involves writing more than 4 essays a year", etc.

Passing the buck on to judges is how systems try to avoid insanely idiotic edge cases that inevitably comes from extremely concrete legislation -- judges are the political organ trusted with discretion and judgement.

Yes, that makes the legal system less predictable (which is bad), but the alternative is not "incredibly concrete legislation that doesn't have any terrible edge cases". The alternative is "iron-rules bureaucracy that follows a brain-dead flow chart" -- i.e. precisely the system that people on here like to complain about.

Granted, "prove x is true" can be incredibly sane or downright impossible, depending on how sensible your judge is. I just don't think there is really an alternative here that isn't worse. Similarly, note that the rules on this website are also pretty open to interpretation, and you may get different rulings from different mods. Nonetheless, trying to simply write more concrete rules could never actually work.

The counterfactual isn’t dumb regulations about tests, it’s racial quotas or laissez faire freedom of association. The politics of quotas have been unpalatable to voters forever so instead we get opaque jurisprudence trying to square the circle of stopping racism without noticing minority underperformance. There’s a ton of path dependence that got us here, and while the bureaucracy might be metastatic at this point good concrete legislation in the 1960s might have built a different, more functional world.

Are you arguing you'd prefer the New York school system to use racial quotas? Or that you'd prefer if principals could exclusively hire $race $gender teachers and be protected by freedom of association?

The current system of "hey, try to let the requirements of the job drive the hiring process. Sorry that we can't give you a perfect checklist that guarantees you won't be sued" seems far superior to either of those.

I’d prefer if good workers were hired over bad workers, and failing that quotas could grant the system of racial spoils some transparency. The status quo of neither drives inflationary compliance costs where every company has to shell out for the next hot seminar about racial equity or run the risk of deviating from standard practice and thus become liable for a lawsuit.

But that wasn’t my point. What we get is overdetermined; underperforming minorities are going to underperform, and it’s mean to be mean about that, but they on average are worse than the average worker, so we get a stupid compromise that solves nothing with immense costs but sounds nice and fair so we’re going to be stuck with it forever.

The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion.

What was their test like?

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching. Or that a bank employee should be able to do whatever kind of math they might use for their job.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum. I vaguely remember having to pass an algebra test as an adult, some years after taking the course, in order to continue teaching a subject that involved no algebra at all, but a lot of enforcement of social norms and some design stuff. It seemed a little silly, and I do think I would have been pretty pissed if I had failed and needed to both re-learn algebra and pay a fee to re-take the test.

Seems sort of similar to the kinds of friction you get in big companies. Google has teams that require very in-demand skills and teams that require very out-of-demand skills, but front or back, iOS or Android, C++ or JavaScript, everyone gets paid on the same ladder and has to pass the same interview.

Google actually has a separate SWE-Front End position with different interviews. This is not because Google's interview process is good (it's not), but because the market puts some limits on corporate idiocy.

IIRC, most of the interviews were the same for front end SWEs, but they swapped out the system design interview for a frontend interview.

Yeah that's fair. IME out-of-college interviews tend to be very general, algorithms/data structures stuff (e.g. I did a general interview, and was offered a spot on a computer vision team and on a software engineering team). But if you're hiring somebody with industry experience, especially at a senior level (L5), questions will be geared more to their specialty. The pay scale is still the same though, afaik.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum.

The current system of requiring a college degree with an education specialization is also extra friction and expense compared to the previous system of letting school officials hire 16 year old girls and use their judgement to pick which ones would be any good at it.

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching.

Yes, but then they didn't have anywhere near enough black or hispanic teachers, which was not an acceptable outcome in that culture.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats